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Charlie Gasparino lists the ways Jack Lew will be bad for the country. Pickerhead has come to believe the president ought to have the fools he has picked. It will be our Lenin strategy. During 1917 Kerensky’s Provisional government was struggling and Lenin, always one to turn a phrase said, “The worse the better.”
Yes, Jack Lew’s bizarre signature will look pretty awful on our currency, but the real ugly is what he means for our economy.
Lew, President Obama’s choice as the country’s next Treasury chief, will be a carbon copy of his predecessor, Tim Geithner: a drone who’ll mindlessly carry out the president’s short-sighted economic agenda, no matter how silly or disastrous the policy.
When Geithner took over at Treasury in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, many on Wall Street expected big things. After all, he had a stellar resume: president of the New York Fed after serving in a top post at the IMF and in the Clinton Treasury Department under Bob Rubin and Larry Summers.
The markets shot up when he was named to the job, as traders applauded the appointment of someone they thought was a key architect of the 2008 banking rescues, which staved off a total collapse of the financial system and a likely depression.
But the markets soon turned south, as Geithner showed his true colors. Truth be told, Geithner had been a side player in the bailouts, which were arranged mainly by Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. But (as people in the markets came to realize) he was a key player in the crisis: As New York Fed president, Geithner was the key guy in charge of making sure the big banks like Citigroup didn’t load up on risky assets — which of course they did, which is why the taxpayer-financed bailout became necessary.
People who know Geithner say he’s weighing a tell-all book on the crisis and recovery. But it will belong on the “fiction” shelves, because nothing the president or his Treasury chief did had much impact. It’s been Bernanke’s unprecedented money-printing and super-low interest rates that keep inflating stock prices while keeping banks’ borrowing costs so low that it’s nearly impossible for them not to make money and repair their balance sheets.
The price of Bernanke’s medicine, of course, is a debased currency, plus a high risk of serious inflation if the economy ever picks up steam. …
Streetwise Professor reacts to the president’s claim only governments can get things done.
… Firms are cooperative enterprises that engage in collective action to produce things that people value. Markets facilitate cooperation between diverse individuals who may not even know of each others’ existence, and who do not intend to cooperate, but end up doing so while pursuing their own self-interested objectives due to the way that price signals convey information about benefits and costs, and provide powerful incentives to act on that information. The price system coordinates, and thereby permits multitudes to cooperate.
In other words, the market system is a mixture of cooperation and competition.
In contrast, in Obama’s cramped vision, government and government alone is the sole nexus of cooperation in society. That it is coercive “cooperation”, rather than voluntary cooperation (a la Burke, de Toqueville, or firms operating in markets) escapes his attention, or at least doesn’t bother him one whit. To him the alternatives are: cooperation mediated through government and government alone, or atomistic competition, red in tooth and claw. A regurgitation of the Social Darwinian crap he heaved up a year or two ago.
I do not know whether Obama’s Straw Man is the product of extreme intellectual limitations or extreme intellectual dishonesty. I’m voting “both” actually. But regardless, it is embarrassing to witness such a display, and even more embarrassing to see it praised as some great oration.
The real Straw Man here is Obama. Straw Man as in the Wizard of Oz. Because he really needs a brain.
American Glob wonders why dems are always comparing the president to GOP guys like Lincoln and Reagan,
He’s Lincoln! He’s Reagan! He’s Lincoln! He’s Reagan! He’s Lincoln! He’s Reagan!
Guess what folks… he’s neither.
Lincoln united a divided country, Obama has done everything in his power to further polarize Americans against each other. Reagan turned around a dismal economy, Obama has made things worse.
Frankly, if liberals are as proud of Obama as they claim to be while wiping the drool from their chins, why do they never compare Obama to Democratic Party presidents? Are Democrats admitting that Republican presidents are more effective and appealing? It sure seems that way.
Here’s Valerie Jarrett, the latest of many to compare Obama to Abraham Lincoln…
Obama’s advisor went on to compare the current president with Abraham Lincoln. “I think you can’t compare the Civil War to what we’re going through,” she said. “But we’ve been through a really tough time in our country. And seeing how Lincoln had to work so hard just to make the progress that he did, how he never gave up, and how resilient he was, and [how] he tried a whole range of different strategies. And I think obviously that resonated with the president. And so it kind of reaffirmed what he already knew, which is you have to be resilient. you have to be determined. And you can’t lose your focus, you can’t get distracted by short-term political interests.
Michael Tomasky swoons at the Daily Beast…
How Obama Can Become Our Era’s Reagan
Barack Obama’s speech was elegantly pugnacious, a fine articulation of civic-republican liberalism and a very clear statement of a political agenda, with its specific mentions of climate change and inequality and other concerns. As others have noted, it was his most openly liberal speech as president, and it tells us what he aiming for in term two. He wants to do for liberalism (without using the word of course; we’re still not at that point yet) what Ronald Reagan did for conservatism.
It’s funny how you never hear Democrats squeal with delight saying, Finally! Our generation’s Jimmy Carter! At Last! A Woodrow Wilson of our very own!
There’s a reason for that.
Dear Democrats,
You own Obama and everything his presidency has wrought. Please stop comparing him to successful Republicans. Your hypocrisy is only slightly more annoying than the credit you give our intelligence.
Signed,
Half of the country
Sen. Barrasso of Wyoming has misgivings with the Hagel pick. We say, let the fool get the other fools he wants.
I recently returned from meeting in Israel with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and in Afghanistan with U.S. generals and troops in the field. The discussions touched on some common themes: supporting Israel, America’s strongest ally in the region, and protecting U.S. interests in the Middle East.
These talks have reinforced my understanding of the tremendous challenges the next secretary of defense will face on a range of national-security issues. Strong leadership and sound judgment will be required day in and day out.
Since Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator, was nominated to be the next defense secretary, there is new attention on his many controversial statements. One of them, his remark that “the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people” on Capitol Hill, I found to be particularly offensive and wrong.
As a senator required to provide “advice and consent” on his appointment, I recently asked Mr. Hagel about his comment. He apologized for it and explained that he was only commenting on the strength of the lobby. While I respect his apology, I can’t respect his explanation. My national-security votes are based on America’s national security—not lobbyists’ issues, interests or intimidation.
While Mr. Hagel’s troublesome and insulting words matter, his policy positions matter even more. He has a record of votes and decisions that are far outside the mainstream of foreign policy supported by both Republicans and Democrats.
Mr. Hagel was one of only two U.S. senators to oppose financial sanctions against Iran in 2001. In 2007, he wrote to President George W. Bush urging “direct, unconditional, and comprehensive talks with Iran.” In 2008, he again was one of only two senators to vote against sanctions. That same year, he even implied, in his book “America: Our Next Chapter,” that a nuclear Iran might not be so bad because countries with nuclear weapons “will often respond with some degree of responsible, or at least sane, behavior.” …
Randy Barnett in Volokh Conspiracy posts on a new paper by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.
Glenn Reynolds has a terrific, and very short, paper on SSRN on Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime, which I highly recommend. (Conor Friedersdorf blogs about it here.) Here is the key passage that summarizes the problem:
Overcriminalization has thus left us in a peculiar place: Though people suspected of a crime have extensive due process rights in dealing with the police, and people charged with a crime have even more extensive due process rights in court, the actual decision whether or not to charge a person with a crime is almost completely unconstrained. Yet, because of overcharging and plea bargains, that decision is probably the single most important event in the chain of criminal procedure.
He then offers a number of tentative suggestions on how to address this problem, which Friedersdorf summarizes as follows:
Rather than granting prosecutors absolute immunity against lawsuits, shift to a “qualified, good-faith immunity for prosecutors” — in other words, make them personally liable in instance when they aren’t carrying out their duties in good faith.
If a personal is charged with a crime and acquitted, make the prosecution pay their legal bill. Or if there are multiple crimes being adjudicated, “we might pro-rate things: Charge a defendant with 20 offenses, but convict on only one, and the prosecution must bear 95% of the defendant’s legal fees. This would certainly discourage overcharging.”
Ban plea bargains all together, so that every criminal charge filed would have to be backed up in open court.
Alternatively, “we might require that the prosecution’s plea offers be presented to a jury or judge before sentencing. Jurors might then wonder why they are being asked to sentence a defendant to 20 years without parole when the prosecution was willing to settle for 5. 15 years in jail seems a rather stiff punishment for making the state undergo the bother of a trial.”
Consider whether regulatory violations should be subject to criminal sanctions at all.
Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.
Leno: Michelle Obama turned 49 the other day. Said she didn’t want an extravagant gift from Barack. Oh, don’t worry. He’s very careful with his own money.
Fallon: Education Secy. Arne Duncan says he’ll stay in the Obama White House. He wants to make the United States No. 1 in education, and he won’t stop until our students are doing gooder.
Conan: On raising the debt limit Obama says the U.S. is no “deadbeat nation.” Then the President added, “By the way — If China calls, I’m not here!”
Conan: Oprah Winfrey said she conducted an “intense” two-and-a-half-hour interview with Lance Armstrong. Oprah said she never would have had the stamina for that if Lance hadn’t given her a little something to keep going. …